THE AIREDALE Writers Circle/Gathered round the table/To tackle anew/The verse form Clerihew.

Hmm. Not very good.

As we came to realise during the January meeting, the Clerihew, a short, sharp verse form designed to nail a famous person to the page, is not as easy as it looks.

Neil Wilson led the session, first debunking the myth that the original Clerihew was written by a bored clergyman.

Appropriately enough, such a cheeky, subversive art was started by a bored schoolboy in a chemistry lab: Sir Humphrey Davy/Abominated gravy/He lived in the odium/Of having discovered sodium.

Once the genie was out of the bottle, it was irrepressible. Ernest Clerihew Bentley couldn’t stop writing the things, publishing three volumes in his lifetime: Biography for Beginners (1905), More Biography (1929) and Baseless Biography (1939).

His most famous gem was: Christopher Wren/Dined with some men/He said if anyone calls/Tell them I’m designing St Pauls.

The discipline needed to encapsulate a theme in such a rapid outburst of verse was duly tested.

Neil gave us the simple rules: four lines; first line containing subject, usually someone famous, but could be anyone or anything; rhyme pattern AABB. Irregular line length, metre and contrived rhymes give the form its quirkiness.

Twenty minutes of steam-from-the-top-of-the-head-inducing concentration produced a sizeable collection, recitation of which induced guffaws, amazement or duh.

The best one was a joint effort. Neil read: Meryl Streep/Said “You’re a creep” .

Whereupon Chris leapt in with: Trump retaliated/“You’re overrated.”

The rest covered a range of subjects.

Sport: Andy Murray/ Always in a hurry/Dressed in white/And now a knight (Neil Wilson); Golfer Tiger Woods/Never failed to come up with the goods/Until he cheated/Then game and fame depleted (Pat Farley).

Literary: James Joyce/Had a sweet tenor voice/He wrote Finnegans Wake/Which is completely opaque (Chris Manners);

Historical: Charles the First/Came off the worst/When Cromwell, the crawler/Made him eight inches smaller (Lisa Firth).

Political: Vladimir Putin/Puts his boot in/Wherever he knows/It will rankle his foes. This is my own effort.

Getting the Clerihew right is like being a stand-up – timing is all.

A good Clerihew gets some of the elements right; the genius Clerihew skewers the essence of its subject through a sweet combination of all the elements.

Try some yourself - better than crosswords for improving braincells.

Lisa Firth, one of our newest members who became a published novelist with Harper Collins very soon after starting to write, is going to tell us how she did it at the next meeting on Tuesday February 14 at 7.30pm in the Sight Airedale building, in Albert Street behind Keighley library.

All welcome, including non-members to see if they’d like to join the Airedale Writers Circle. Visit the AWC website or email Neil at n.d.wilson@hotmail.co.uk for further information.

• Have you missed any previous articles in the Keighley News by Airedale Writers Circle members? Don’t have a write old strop, simply visit keighleynews.co.uk, click on What’s On then Out and About, and you’ll find them all.they are